Email

Emacs Modes

• Post

  An email composing mode designed for use with external mailers such as mutt, sylpheed, or even newsreaders like slrn. It should work with anything that uses an external editor, but I use mutt, and tend to announce major changes on the mutt-users list (searchable archive).

  Downloads

  post.el.gz.
  post.el.gz.sig, GPG/PGP signature for the above.
  

  Last updated 2/24/2008. (Erik Mugele updated it to handle both versions of (how-many).)

  post_fido.patch: This patch from Alexander Gromnizki automatically inserts a Keywords header (with password) into the message if the destination is in the fido7.* news hierarchy. Everyone who writes to those newsgroups must put their password in their messages, because posts without it will be rejected. You may also see http://www.fido7.ru for additional information. I think this patch could be easily generalized if more newsservers adopt this user authentification method, but I haven't tried it.

  Selected features (in no particular order):

  • Syntax highlighting.
  • Easy quoting and dequoting.
  • Random signature selection, and more importantly, easy correction when it comes up with something you don't want.
  • Reminds you when you meant to attach something but forgot. Or at least it tries to do so without bugging you every time you send an email.

  Installation

  Read the comments near the top, especially the part that goes in your .emacs(.el).

  Please send any enhancements or bug fixes to rob dot reid at nrc-cnrc dot gc period ca.

  Philip J. Hollenback (he of the exotic *macs ;-) has written a HOWTO for mutt and post on MacOS

  Olivier Tharan has helpfully written a HOWTO in French on using post with mutt, and Tim Carroll came along and helpfully translated it into English. Translations to other languages (of anything here) are of course welcome.

  Recent Changes

  Most of them aren't that recent. A fairly complete changelog is in the file itself.

• Eric Kidd's mutt mode. Where post mode got its start. Then I Frankensteinishly merged it with Dave Pearson's code... Uses a new emacs for each message instead of calling emacsclient.
• Dave Pearson's mutt-alias.el. Functions to expand mail aliases while composing a message in Emacs.
• Dave's also written smartsig.el which should work with post.el and looks really neat but I haven't gotten around to actually using it yet.
• New! I discovered how easy to use generic-x is and whipped up a couple of syntax highlighting modes. I present here muttrc.el so you can turn your mutt configuration files into the angriest of fruit salads ;-). Click here for my GPG signature on it.
• Newer! After announcing my muttrc.el Dave Pearson told me it had already been done, and done better, by Laurent Pelecq. Click here for the real muttrc-mode.el.

Don't Believe The Vile Propaganda

Try emacsclient or gnuclient for avoiding the Emacs startup/shutdown wait. If they don't do the trick, there's jed, which does an excellent job of emulating emacs while remaining lightweight. It uses S-Lang for customization, as in these files:

• muttrc.sl, a mode for editing .muttrc, by Dave Pearson.
• mail_mode-mutt.sl, a mutt mail mode for jed, Thomas Roessler, <roessler at guug period de> and Ulli "Framstag" Horlacher <framstag at belwue period de>.

Mutt

My email program of choice is Mutt, originally chosen for its PGP/MIME support. Mutt also has many other nice features, though, such as syntax coloring, threading, and very extensive customizability. In general it's similar to elm or pine, but better. Here's a screenshot.

If you use UNIX but don't have Mutt, get it here, then come back.

Dealing with frequent colloquium announcements and reminders

Associated with any largish group of scientists is a steady stream of colloquia, seminars, meetings, and lunch talks. Multiply that with emails notices sent 1 month, 1 week, 1 day, 1 hour, and 1 minute before the event, and the result is a reluctance of those scientists to read, or at least remember, any of those emails.

collofilt is a perl script that tries to ensure the notices have a useful (i.e. event date and time) Subject: line. Use it by putting something like this in your ~/.procmailrc, which will also take care of duplicate emails! Both are optimized for the format of notices most often used around NRAO and UVa astro environment circa February 2008.

Dealing with many mailing lists and duplicate messages

Put something like this in your ~/.procmailrc (the same as above). (This is a common problem and I certainly didn't start from scratch. Credit is given where I've remembered it.)

Filter for Proofpoint's suspected spam reports

Proofpoint is a company that filters spam and sends its clients reports of the caught spam for them to inspect for false positives (I found 2 in the first few months, but none lately.) If you don't care about Proofpoint, you don't need this filter.

Unfortunately the text/plain part of the report is a real mess, so I wrote

pprfilter

to clean it up. It is a short PERL script with instructions in the comments. I use it as a display_filter in mutt, but since it is a simple text filter it should be generally useful to anyone.

NEWS:

Oct. 6, 2004	Now reads the Proofpoint report in paragraph mode to avoid problems with roving linebreaks.
Feb. 2, 2005	Now that Proofpoint has stopped using paragraphs, pprfilter breaks lines on every >.

Screenshot

Dynamic signatures

Note that I have nothing to do with these, like many things on this page. I've just placed them here to make them more accessible.

The above post mode for emacs lets one use several functions for selecting dynamic signatures, such as yow!, fortune, or randomly drawing (see below) or interactively picking one from a file or directory.

Mutt can also append a randomly chosen signature to your outgoing emails if you have a program to supply the signature. You do this by putting this in your .muttrc:

set signature="program|"

Here's a few suggestions for program:

• findquotes: Uses a directory with one quote per file.

• randsig1.pl: This is a slightly modified (switched order of fixed and random parts, and made it change .plan, too) version of Don Blaheta's PERL script. It keeps all of the quotes in one file, which should be better for compressing the quotes. gzip on the individual quotes actually produces bigger files!

• randsig3.pl: Glenn Maynard <glennm at mediaone period net> souped up randsig1.pl to use a regular .sig file, replacing an occurance of "%QUOTE%" with the random signature. It also takes the sigfile and quotefile as arguments, so you can easily use different sigs and/or quotes (or not use a quote at all), depending on where your message is going.
• randomsig2.pl: Louis-David Mitterrand <mito at sprynet period com> wrote this very short PERL doodad takes as an argument a file of quotes separated by blank lines. The script can in fact be shortened enough to do away with a separate script file: set signature="/usr/bin/perl -F'\n\s*\n' -an0777e 'srand; \ print $F[int(rand($#F))].\"\n\"' ~/txt/quotes.txt |" Unfortunately this doesn't work from my command line, but it does from mutt. I'm not sure why, but I suspect it has something with quoting. It's neat, but having a separate script is handy for generating a new sig whenever you decide the original one is inappropriate for the recipient(s).
• Bernhard Sadlowski <sadlowsk at mathematik period uni-bielefeld period de> pointed out that it's easy to get fortune to read a file you've made up.
• huggietag, by Simon Huggins, looks very powerful, particularly for putting the fixed part on one side of the sig and the variable part on the other, but I haven't played with it.

Click here if you don't use mutt, and need a way of getting random snippets but all you can get the application you're using to do is read from a particular file.

Remember that the whole thing (quote + .fixedsig) should fit inside 4 lines of 80 characters each for it to be McQ, if you care about such things.

If you happen across Sven Guckes' Mutt manual, and notice the bit about Mutt having a builtin sig randomizer, sorry, it doesn't. That feature went missing, which is why the above was written.